Unzip .rar from command-line with 7-Zip

On the Windows command-line, I can extract archives like this:

7za e somefile.zip

I know 7-Zip supports .rar in the GUI, but can it be done in commandline mode?

2 Answers

Yes, you can extract .rar archives from the command line, but only if you use 7z, not 7za:

7za.exe (a = alone) is a standalone version of 7-Zip. 7za.exe supports only 7z, lzma, cab, zip, gzip, bzip2, Z and tar formats. 7za.exe doesn't use external modules.

The above applies to both Linux and Windows and the syntax is identical:

Windows:

C:\Users\me>7z e dll-test.rar
7-Zip 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18
Processing archive: dll-test.rar
Extracting mso97.dll
Everything is Ok
Size: 3782416
Compressed: 1857291

Linux:

[me ~]$ 7z e dll-test.rar
7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,8 CPUs)
Processing archive: dll-test.rar
Extracting mso97.dll
Everything is Ok
Size: 3782416
Compressed: 1857291

You can see all command lines in the "7-zip.chm" help file (from the installation):

Extracting rar is like extracting all files:

7z x archive.rar

For example:

"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" x "C:\Archives\test file.rar"